thrawnimo @thrawnimo

"In my almost 40 years as a Jesuit, I’ve known dozens of celibate gay priests who have led what Pope Francis called 'good, holy and celibate' lives, modeling Jesus’s message of love and mercy. Similar to the experience of Father Berg and Professor Lock, they have been for me, and for many of my friends, spiritual directors, pastors, professors and mentors. And they have done so in a church that sometimes ignores, denigrates or even insults them. The most compelling argument for openness to ordaining gay men to the priesthood is the presence of many holy and healthy gay and celibate priests."

Outreach @OutrchCatholic

a week ago

A reflection on a recent paper on seminary formation and priestly ordination from the McGrath Institute for Church Life. Read more at Outreach. outreach.faith/2026/07/should…

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@honorablesaint As a single person who attends mass by myself, this is literally never my experience at NO masses. Every single time, I’m greeted by welcoming and loving people of all ages and demographics. It helps to seem like you love them!

So here's a little scoop: you know Goose, that new gay dating app? It's apparently been using a network of AI-generated Instagay accounts to lure dudes onto the app. Here's what we learned in our @WIRED investigation: 🧵

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@stavvybaby Also: @jojo_pdx Jojo, Screen Door for a decadent southern brunch, Matt’s BBQ Tacos (get the brisket taco with queso).

@stavvybaby Massive second to Hat Yai, they’re amazing. Also love Rangoon Bistro. If you want to go more decadent: Normandie or L’echelle are outstanding French restaurants. and Jeju in SE has the best Bao bun burgers you’ll ever try

Dear friends: I wanted to say a few words about our weekend Outreach conference, in light of the Holy Spirit. First, as I’ve mentioned before, Conor Reidy, who now runs Outreach as its executive director; Jack Consolie, the assistant director; and Alessandra Rose, our development director, were responsible for the amazing weekend. Conor, Jack and Alessandra are immense gifts from God to the LGBTQ Catholic community. Besides the moving liturgies, the lively panels, the thoughtful keynoters and the joy-filled conversations, there are two things I want to highlight. The first is not simply Cardinal McElroy’s quietly historic homily (posted at Outreach.faith) but his very presence. Not long ago, the idea that the cardinal-archbishop of any diocese would welcome a group of LGBTQ Catholics at a Mass he was celebrating and say, as he did, that it was a “privilege” to be with them, would have been deemed insane. But this has now happened twice: once with Cardinal Gregory in 2024 and now with Cardinal McElroy. Things change. Second, I want to say how amazed I am by Outreach’s growth. I’ll spare you the “origin story,” but when we began five years ago, no one expected that we would have a conference with almost 500 participants at Georgetown University with the local ordinary celebrating Mass for us. I certainly didn’t. All weekend I kept looking around and thinking, “How did we get here?” We got here thanks to Conor, Jack and Alessandra (as well as Mike O’Loughlin, Ryan Di Corpo and Jai Sen before them), our young adult committee, our music team, our volunteers, our friends at America Media, and many others. But mainly we got here with the help of the Holy Spirit. If I didn’t know where Outreach was going, the Holy Spirit did. All weekend this psalm refrain came to me: “This is the Lord’s doing. And it is marvelous in our eyes.” I’m longing to see where the Spirit will lead next. (Photo by Kevin Christopher Robles for Outreach)

the lamestream media are doing their best to stop you from seeing this

positive side of X 🌞 @positivityofx

5 months ago

Duck gliding through cherry blossom water

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He was 'saved' on Endor, it just happens to be that the wages of sin when paid in full are death

Best of Star Wars @bestofstarwar

2 months ago

What if Vader was saved on Endor? Do you think he would have helped build the New Jedi Order?

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Platner: The national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by. But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us.

Platner: Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It's a journey. I've made mistakes in my life. Mistakes that I regret, that I live with and that I continue to learn from. And I'm still far from perfect. But every day I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than I was before. And if you give me the chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator

What those who are unhappy with the pope’s comments on war need to get into their heads is that his concern – and the concern of other churchmen and theologians who have argued for a more restrictive approach to war in modern times – is the protection of innocent lives. That’s it. It isn’t pacifism, or cowardice, or Neville Chamberlain style naiveté, or misplaced sympathy for evildoers, or any of the other straw men people keep attacking. It’s the enormous number of civilians who have done nothing deserving of harm and yet are killed, or have their homes destroyed, or whose society’s infrastructure is so devastated that anything like normal life becomes impossible for them. That some war aim is good in the abstract, or that some government has done evil, does not magically make it acceptable to inflict this sort of damage on huge populations of innocent people who simply get caught up in the middle of conflict between warring armies. That A has a legitimate reason to attack B does not somehow entail that he is at liberty to do things that inflict enormous harm on some third party C in the process. Everyone knows this in other contexts, but for some reason some people wrongly suppose that it doesn’t apply in war. And when they try to rationalize this attitude by appeal to the good consequences they claim war will bring about, their reasoning is no different from (and no less morally corrupt than) the similarly utilitarian arguments others use to justify abortion, euthanasia, and the like.

happy pride month

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

Deep inner suffering inevitably arises when the human person is reduced to performance, consumption, or a statistical datum. Many young people today live under the yoke of expectations to perform, immersed in an exasperated competitiveness that generates anxiety, fear of not measuring up, and disorientation.

Here is a view, occasioned by the papal encyclical, that I'm throwing out as a rough thought because it could be wrong. The default of papal rhetoric is to speak about global issues in terms of structures and systems rather than specific leaders or nation-states. In the new encyclical's call to gentle and restrain A.I., e.g., the consistent idea is always that we need "clear criteria and effective oversight" by some kind of neutral transnational authority, details TBD. There are reasons for this rhetorical mode beyond the Church's longstanding internationalist disposition: A rhetoric of structures and systems avoids a risky personalization of politics, where you seem to be "calling out" individual governments or actors. But it also comes with the risk of sounding utopian and irrelevant under 21st century conditions, where vis-a-vis Artificial Intelligence, in particular, a really narrow set of actors -- the governments of China and America, the leaders of the frontier companies -- are carrying almost all the decisionmaking weight. It seems like in this environment we are a bit closer to a medieval model where the Church is arguably the only transnational organization of great moment (certainly Pope Leo has demonstrated that many people are *very* interested in what Rome has to say about A.I. whereas no one would care if the UN dropped a big document on the subject), and the Vatican is in the position of arguing with and cajoling a set of princes, corporate and dictatorial and democratically elected, whose personal choices are likely to decide the direction that this tech takes. (As in, for instance, the ongoing argument inside the Trump White House about its un-issued A.I. executive order.) I wonder if papal rhetoric might usefully adapt to this reality -- not by calling out Trump or Xi or Sam Altman or Dario Amodei by name, or not necessarily, but by offering more explicit advice to today's leaders and their advisers about their unique power, the moral obligations that come with it, and the judgment of God that awaits if they get things badly wrong. You can draw some of that out of Vatican documents right now, but the balance always tilts toward hypothetical structural solutions. I think where we are, and where we might be going -- for instance, toward choices about A.I. made under conditions of greater acceleration and potential crisis -- there is a case for treating the actual deciders as the crucial actors rather than always imagining an entirely different world.

The document should put to rest any questions about how to interpret Leo's "plane remarks." He envisions revitalizing the Church by emphasizing its role as a counterweight to state and capitalist violence, while essentially tabling issues he views as threatening Church unity.

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery and for failing to condemn it for centuries. apnews.com/article/pope-a…

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness. #MagnificaHumanitas vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

They want you to own nothing. They want you to rent your car, your house, your entire life from them, from a billionaire class that owns everything around you. That's their ideal future, and we can't let them have it.